Robert Stein (1950)

Robert Stein (1972)

Robert Stein (2000s)

About Me

editor, publisher, media critic and journalism teacher,
is a former Chairman of the American Society of Magazine Editors, and author of “Media Power: Who Is Shaping Your Picture of the World?” Before the war in Iraq, he wrote in The New York Times: “I see a generation gap in the debate over going to war in Iraq. Those of us who fought in World War II know there was no instant or easy glory in being part of 'The Greatest Generation,' just as we knew in the 1990s that stock-market booms don’t last forever.
We don’t have all the answers, but we want to spare our children and grandchildren from being slaughtered by politicians with a video-game mentality."
This is not meant to extol geezer wisdom but suggest that, even in our age of 24/7 hot flashes, something can be said for perspective.
The Web is a wide space for spreading news, but it can also be a deep well of collective memory to help us understand today’s world. In olden days, tribes kept village elders around to remind them with which foot to begin the ritual dance. Start the music.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Facebook Future: Clues from the Past

Media
ghosts hover over Facebook’s I.P.O. with a valuation of $105 billion, raising
old questions about how to turn the attention of millions into profit from
advertisers.

The
answers have never been clear, but for someone who spent decades in that
search, the past suggests a rocky road to future profits for new bridegroom Mark Zuckerberg's enterprise.

In 1997, when stock of the Internet’s first
phenomenon was soaring, in a New York Times OpEd piece, “AOL’s Bottom Line,”
I questioned how a dial-up service was eating up traditional journalism, eventually swallowing a chunk of it in what has been called the worst merger in media
history.

I compared AOL then to mass magazines of my era which
kept accruing ever higher circulations at cut rates while consumers needed them
less and less in the hope that advertisers would provide revenue to save them.

The magazines died but AOL was bailed out,
ironically, by a merger with Time Inc., the healthiest dead-tree dinosaur,
which worked out so miserably that AOL had to be spun off before it sank the
remains of Henry Luce's empire.

That history does not bode well for Facebook, in the
light of almost a century’s media experience with the American information
industry, the only big business in which customers don’t pay for the product.
What has value is a byproduct, their attention, which is then resold to
advertisers.

An ominous sign is the recent withdrawal of General Motors ads from Facebook, with observers noting the need to “convert that fan
engagement into a business outcome for marketers.”

While users avidly share their vacation slides and
other passing interests, how does a social network divert enough of their
attention to pass it on profitably to people who want to sell them things?

No one has solved that problem on a large scale
before. If Facebook can, it will turn out to be more than a lumbering giant
like those of old. Until it does and/or uses its inflated stock to acquire entities that actually make money, it looks more like a highly overpriced stock
market dream.